This being Preservation Week, we thought we’d share with you some of the analog preservation going on here under the auspices of the Smithsonian Center for Archives Conservation (SCAC). In February, we received the happy news that we were awarded a grant from Save America’s Treasures to hire a part-time conservator to manage the physical treatment of collections being cataloged as part of the Field Book Project. Although digitization efforts for these field books are not currently funded, these conservation treatments will ensure safe handling once digitization is underway.

Original photographic prints in poor condition to be stabilized; it is unknown if negatives exist.

The Save America’s Treasures funding will directly enhance the cataloging efforts of the CLIR-funded Field Book Project through the development of preservation and conservation workflows. Preservation has many faces and phases, one of them being reformatting for access and creating multiple backup formats of materials with “inherent vice”. Reformatting, whether microfilm, preservation photocopy or digitization, can also be unfriendly and damaging to the fragile physical original unless preservation is built into a cataloging and digitization workflow. Our materials are not all alike in size and format and while they may have stood the test of time (i.e., use and handling by generations of researchers using them as primary sources) many are fragile and can’t be fed through an automated scanner or opened on a flatbed scanner. For example, gatherings of single leaves that have become dog-eared and crumpled together, if brittle, can quickly become torn paper and lost information in the most careful digitization technician’s hands.

Our field notes span over at least two centuries’ worth of changing note-taking methods and supplies. They are recorded on everything from pocket-sized diaries to gatherings of letter paper there were meant to be bound later and sometimes ended up clamped together in terrifyingly strong springback binders. They range from dime-store pocket journals the size of an index card, to spiral wire-bindings, to the modern standard composition or the federal standard green laboratory sewn notebook. There may be accompanying materials, like a typed transcript or a rewritten manuscript on hotel stationery that was later bound, stitched or stapled in a uniform or ad-hoc manner.

There may be surprises tucked into field books, such as original drawings, folded maps, original photographs, or ephemera like receipts, train timetables and business cards. Some books will have poorly afterthought binding structures that obstruct the view of writing that disappears into the center margins, that restrict their opening so that they cannot be opened sufficiently to be scanned by an overhead camera scanning back, or are in danger of losing their structural integrity altogether.

Lockshin separating, humidifying, flattening and mending leaves of the crumpled manuscript field book seen above."

As catalogers come across these variations and conditions, they will assign a condition rating to flag the item for treatment by the conservation lab. The project conservator and technicians will provide the minimum treatments needed to digitize the book safely and document any additional follow-up steps if necessary for post digitization work, such as refolding an oversize map. Books in an advanced state of deterioration, such as the one pictured below with broken sewing with loss of spine material and cover attachments, might be fully disbound prior to scanning and flagged for conservation repair and rebinding after digitization. Interim or custom boxes and document folders will support vulnerable materials.

In a mass project like this, where we are dealing with hundreds, potentially thousands, of objects (and even tens of thousands if you count the individual pages), we must limit ourselves to an efficient range of treatment protocols in what is called Minimum Accepted Practice

The SCAC conservation team will document the very basics of treatment in the Preservation Module of the Field Book Project database. We are also developing a visual guide of our Best Practices for catalogers and conservation technicians that may be rolled out to partners on the Field Book Project in the future. We look forward to sharing more highlights of our preservation work not just this week, but throughout the coming years.

The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.